Communications between devices may be analyzed on a per-flow basis, with each flow comprising a set of communications between a particular set of endpoints and related to a particular application, such as a flow between a client and server related to a file transfer. Endpoints may include servers, storage devices, virtual machine, client devices, or any other such device.
Flows may be logically grouped based on endpoints or applications, for purposes such as monitoring, investigating, and troubleshooting performance of servers, storage devices or logical units, and/or applications. Administrators may group flows based on logical unit number (LUN), server or other device, or application, and may use aggregation or thresholding functions for monitoring and troubleshooting.
In conventional systems, administrators may need to manually create collections or groups of flows. This requires an in-depth knowledge of end device addresses, connectivity, flow definitions, zone aliases, etc., and may be complex and cumbersome even for an expert user. Furthermore, in very large deployments with many hundreds or thousands of flows, it may not be feasible to manually analyze and configure each flow to be part of a group or collection.
The details of various embodiments of the methods and systems are set forth in the accompanying drawings and the description below.